Category: Arduino

Alright – so I know everybody that has followed this is wondering “WTF did he give up?”

To answer that quickly NO.

I’ve been waiting on some things to come in and will most likely start to work on this again this weekend. I apologize for any problems this may have caused others. I have been working on various computer interfaces for working with our project, but each is a very large interface that I’ve yet to near completion with.

On a sad note – wild dogs got all but my roosters over the last month, so this is a priority on my plate to finish. So this weekend here is the plan for all to prepare for.

The next part of this series will be creating an automated chicken coop door, for this part of our project. Your parts list will include. Continue reading “Update 5/11/17”

I’m currently a lil low on funds as my wife and I are paying off our house this week. When I’ve regained a little cash, I will be continuing on with the automation build for everyone. I have no timetable for this, but hopefully within the next month we will be moving forward.

As an aside, I’ve seen this web API before designed around my favorite SciFi series of all time STAR TREK (Yes, me and the wife are major trekkies). And I thought I’d post it here so everyone can see the idea that will be used for the control system that we will add as time goes along.

Storing the Data with MySQL

So far you should see the temperature reported in the right debug pane of Node-RED once when the NodeMCU loads, and then periodically to the time you have set for reporting. Now we store the data in a MySQL database.

Reading Temperature

One of the requirements we had for our Automated Chicken coop was being able to read the temperature of the coop and react accordingly to it. So breakout your pocket book and grab the following items because in this post we are adding the ability to record temperature from our coop!

Next Steps

If you’re still with me after that last post you are probably thinking to yourself – “Ok so I can send and receive messages from the NodeMCU, how exactly is this going to help automate the coop?” The answer is NodeRed.

“Our First MQTT Message”

Now its time to send our first message via MQTT! Open your Arduino IDE and ensure that your NodeMCU board is connected to your computer. Please check to make sure it is still assigned the same Port, and change the port in the Arduino IDE if necessary. I will do my best to write all the coding examples with the knowledge that readers may not know how to program in any language. As such, if you know how to code, and what is occurring – you can jump to the bottom of this post to grab the full code and bypass the tutorial.

Remotely Controlling our Chicken Coop pt4

Up until now we’ve simply prepared the NodeMCU for programming, before we move on to programming it to do as we want we need to consider how we are going to send commands and retrieve data from our system. While you could set this up with any PC or Laptop, I thought it best to create a small server. For this project, and future projects – the Raspberry PI 3 is perfect for our purposes. It is a low powered computer that can run several Linux distros as well as its own Linux distro Raspbian. It also comes with WiFi and LAN connectivity and a host of other features.

Remotely Controlling our Chicken Coop pt3

Now it is we test our prior setup with the NodeMCU that we covered in the last post.

If you skipped the last section on setting up your NodeMCU with the Arduino IDE, go back HERE and follow the steps to get started.

Anytime you connect a new board to be programmed, I recommend finding a program like the one below to test your board before moving forward. This will save you a ton of problems in determining if the board is correctly selected in the IDE and whether it will work.